GraalVM Update Notifications and Native Image Build Reports for Your GitHub Workflows

The GitHub Action for GraalVM has become more and more popular in the last couple of months and is now used by more than 500 projects on GitHub! Because of that, we’ve added new features, such as built-in caching for Maven and Gradle, and plan to add more that we think make you more productive working with GraalVM and Native Image.

Today, we want to talk about two new features that we’ve recently added to our GitHub action. For those of you that prefer to lock versions of your dependencies, we have introduced new job annotations that inform you about new GraalVM releases and updates:

These update notifications are enabled by default and can be disabled with the check-for-updates option.

The second new feature is support for Native Image build reports. These contain some of the details you already know from the build output we introduced with the 22.0 release. Instead of having to inspect the logs of your build jobs, you can now request build reports with two new options: When you set the native-image-job-reports option to 'true', our action will post a job summary containing a build report for every build job that uses GraalVM Native Image. This is what this looks like in action (no pun intended 😉):

A Native Image build report posted as a job summary for a build job. (Source)

The native-image-pr-reports works in the same way and produces the same build reports, but posts each build report as a comment on pull requests. We believe this helps to better understand how individual pull requests influence aspects such as the total file size, the static analysis performed by Native Image, or the resources used by the build process. Here’s such a comment on the pull request that introduced the new build reports feature. And just in case you’re wondering: yes, we’re adding the total build time and other details to these reports soon.

And that’s it for today. We hope you find these new features of the GitHub Action for GraalVM useful! And as always, please feel free to share any feedback with us on Slack, GitHub, or Twitter.